Funny Thing, Risk!
Why is it funny when somebody slips on a banana skin? We're talking about an accident with a significant risk of personal injury. Is that funny? Do accidents just happen or should we find someone to blame? People in the UK have been obsessed with safety for years. Now, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) has issued a report in which it calls for a more balanced perception of risk.
There's no doubt that we like to laugh at accidents. Witness the popularity of TV shows filled with clips of home videos: a gymnast crashes into a wall, a cute little dancer falls off the stage, a frisbee player steps backwards into a swimming pool. Such misfortunes can be hilarious... when they befall other people! But even when we suffer the humiliation or pain ourselves, the incident can be funny in the retelling, with suitable embellishments, some time later.
The report in question is the RoSPA Annual Review. There's something quintessentially British about RoSPA. It's partly the whole health and safety thing. (The London Metropolitan Police shot dead an innocent Brazilian man, Jean Charles de Menezes, in an underground train station... and they were recently prosecuted under health and safety legislation!) The RoSPA safety organization enjoys royal patronage, and their Annual Review opens with a message from the Queen. The president of the society is Baroness Gibson of Market Rasen, which sounds like something out of a comedy sketch. Market Rasen is a sleepy little market town in Lincolnshire, surely a lovely place, but not able to lend much gravitas to the title of Baroness.
With all this scope for poking fun at RoSPA, the comedy writers and satirists chose none of these things. Instead, they focussed on the name of RoSPA Chief Executive, Sir Tom Mullarkey, and its similarity to malarkey. (For students of colloquial English, malarkey is a general-purpose slang word for communication that is intended to confuse, impress or deceive. It is a word more often spoken than written, so the spelling is variable and unimportant.) So, not much gravitas there either.
The Serious Message
If you can get behind all the royal pomp and the comedy of names, the RoSPA message is a good one. In his report, Mullarkey highlights the need for balance between the essential work of accident prevention and a small-minded bureaucratic culture of 'elf and safety' as he calls it. He speaks out against the extremist protectionism of 'cotton-wool kids' and calls for more robust activity for children. His message... as safe as necessary, not as safe as possible... rings true not just for children but for our fearful, risk-averse society as a whole. Three cheers for Sir Tom!
The Conservative Member of Parliament, Boris Johnson, attracts quite a bit of attention from satirists too. He seems to set himself up as a figure of fun... or is he just like that? Loth as I am to agree with a Conservative MP and a buffoon, I liked what he wrote in The Telegraph on 8 Nov about the de Menezes shooting. Johnson blames the insane cult of health and safety as the root cause of the death of the innocent Brazilian. The obsession with elf and safety seems to override the need to apprehend criminals and combat terrorism. It was clearly not good for the health of the unfortunate Brazilian man but it also compromised the safety of the general public. One cheer for Boris!
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